How were the murders committed in the NCIS episode "The Good Samaritan"?

Question

I recently watched this episode (summary can be found here), and the wrap-up seemed to leave a lot unexplained. Some specific questions I have are:

• Why did they kill two other men before Seeger? Was it just as Gibbs suggested, to make it look like serial killing and disguise the motive?

• Why did they remove all the clothes and bind the victims? Was this again to establish the pattern and hide the true motive?

And most baffling of all,

• How does the ending explain how they managed to commit the crime? The key point was that both suspects had reliable alibis; I don't see how the fact that they are twins could change that (one was confirmed to be at a conference in DC while the other one was at the bank, on camera). There are two women and two roles to be filled there, so the fact that they are twins is inconsequential - still neither of them could have done it. What is the explanation then? Was it just bad writing, or am I missing something?

Answer 1

I don't think it's very clearly explained in the episode, but I believe you're correct on both of your first two bullet points. The reason for the multiple, unusual murders was to confuse any investigation into the real target. This is a common trope for police procedural shows: the idea is that "a serial killer needs no motive", so the investigators will not focus nearly as much on people with an obvious motive to murder the "real" suspect if they have previous murders pointing at a serial killer. (I believe this was also the plot of the pilot episode of Castle, for example.)

For the last question, I think you're confused about the two alibis. The twins did not establish a separate alibi for each twin, because NCIS didn't know there were twins in the first place. Both alibis were for Laura Seeger for the time of two different murders. Her DNA was found at the first crime scene, but she was at a medical conference at the time of that murder. She had a very good reason to commit the second murder, but she was also on video tape at the bank at the time of that murder. The explanation in both cases is that one of the twins committed the murder while the other twin provided the alibi.